国产剧为何比不过美剧韩剧？原来是这些原因降逼格！

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　　Am I going to watch it?

　　Thanks, but no.

　　Actually, I have never watched a Chinese TV drama that was produced on the Chinese mainland¹. Correction, I have never finished watching a Chinese TV drama series because they are too long, and I have too little time and patience.

　　How long is too long? Compared to Korean and Japanese TV dramas, which usually have 10 to 20 episodes², Chinese dramas are famous for telling long stories. In the Name of the People has 52 45-minute episodes. The longest TV drama, Daughter-in-law, tells the story of an old Chinese couple’s culture clash³ with their foreign daughter-in-law. It has aired 3,100 episodes in the past 16 years, and the director said it will continue.

　　How do the directors make the stories last so long? Here is an example: Person A is killed by a Japanese soldier. Even though the audience might have seen how A was killed, character B would come and hold A’s body and repeat the story of how A was killed by a Japanese soldier. B then would tell C that A is dead and ask C to take revenge⁴. In this way, the message that "A was killed by a Japanese soldier" is repeated three times.

　　What is the point of making such a long dialogue? A friend of mine who used to be a TV drama writer told me that the longer the story lasts, the more money he would get.

　　So I was not surprised when The Legend of Zhenhuan, a hot TV drama that swept China off its feet in 2011, was aired in the US and its original 76 45-minute episodes were shortened⁵ to only six 90-minute episodes.

　　Another possible reason for the length is the target audience. Some of the shows target senior citizens like my mother. A 58-year-old housewife, she is a fan of Chinese historical TV dramas, and since many Chinese TV stations run two or three episodes every day, she could finish a drama within a month. When I asked whether she prefers the American TV drama format⁶ with less episodes, she said long TV dramas remind her of chapters in a novel, similar to those from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that began each chapter with a summary couplet.

　　"The story is long, but it has many layers," she said.

　　Over the years, the Chinese TV drama industry has been trying to win young viewers. They produced a lot of fantasy dramas with pretty and handsome actors. But the most popular ones are those that have characters people can relate to. For example, the 2016 50-episode drama Ode to Joy has become one of the most popular dramas because it reflects China’s current economic and social realities.

　　Will I watch it? Probably not. It would waste 2,250 hours of my time.

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